The United Kingdom has a fiercely independent, developed, and international trading economy that was at the forefront of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. The country emerged from World War II as a military victor but with a debilitated manufacturing sector. Postwar recovery was relatively slow, and it took nearly 40 years, with additional stimulation after 1973 from membership in the European Economic Community (now ultimately succeeded by the European Community in the European Union [EU]), for the British economy to improve its competitiveness significantly. Economic growth rates in the 1990s compared favourably with those of other top industrial countries. Manufacturing’s contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) has declined to about one-fifth of the total, with services providing the source of greatest growth. The United Kingdom’s chief trading ties have shifted from its former empire to other members of the EU, which account for more than half its trade in tangible goods. The United States is a major investment and trading partner, and Japan has become a significant investor in local production. American and Japanese companies often choose the United Kingdom as their European base. In addition, other fast-developing East Asian countries with export-oriented economies include the United Kingdom’s open market among their important outlets.

During the 1980s the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher pursued the privatization, or denationalization, of publicly owned corporations that had been nationalized by previous governments. Privatization, accompanied by widespread labour unrest, resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the coal-mining and heavy industrial sectors. Although there was some improvement in the standard of living nationally, in general there was greater prosperity in the South East, including London, than in the heavily industrialized regions of the West Midlands, northern England, Clydeside, and Belfast, whose economies suffered during the 1980s. During the 1980s and ’90s, income disparity also increased. Unemployment and inflation rates were gradually reduced but remained high until the late 1990s. The country’s role as a major world financial centre remained a source of economic strength. Moreover, its exploitation of offshore natural gas since 1967 and oil since 1975 in the North Sea has reduced dependence on coal and imported oil and provided a further economic boost.

Agriculture, forestry, and fishing

Agriculture

The United Kingdom is unusual, even among western European countries, in the small proportion of its employed population (about 2 percent) engaged in agriculture. With commercial intensification of yields and a high level of mechanization, supported initially by national policy and subsequently by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EU, the output of some agricultural products has exceeded demand. Employment in agriculture has declined gradually, and, with the introduction of policies to achieve reduction of surpluses, the trend is likely to continue. Efforts have been made to create alternative employment opportunities in rural areas, some of which are remote from towns. The land area used for agriculture (about three-quarters of the total) has also declined, and the arable share has fallen in favour of pasture.

Official agricultural policy conforms to the CAP and has aimed to improve productivity, to ensure stable markets, to provide producers a fair standard of living, and to guarantee consumers regular food supplies at reasonable prices. To achieve these aims, the CAP provides a system of minimum prices for domestic goods and levies on imports to support domestic prices. Exports are encouraged by subsidies that make up the difference between the world market price and the EU price. For a few products, particularly beef and sheep, there are additional payments made directly to producers. More recent policies have included milk quotas, land set-asides (to compensate farmers for taking land out of agricultural use), and reliance on the price mechanism as a regulator.

The most important farm crops are wheat, barley, oats, sugar beets, potatoes, and rapeseed. While significant proportions of wheat, barley, and rapeseed provide animal feed, much of the remainder is processed for human consumption through flour milling (wheat), malting and distilling (barley), and the production of vegetable oil (rapeseed). The main livestock products derive from cattle and calves, sheep and lambs, pigs, and poultry. The United Kingdom has achieved a high level of self-sufficiency in the main agricultural products except for sugar and cheese.

Forestry

About one-tenth of the United Kingdom’s land area is devoted to productive forestry. The government-supported Forestry Commission manages almost half of these woodlands, and the rest are in private hands. Domestic timber production supplies less than one-fifth of the United Kingdom’s demand. The majority of new plantings are of conifers in upland areas, but the commission encourages planting broad-leaved trees where appropriate.

Fishing

Although the United Kingdom is one of Europe’s leading fishing countries, the industry has been in long-term decline. Fishing limits were extended to 200 nautical miles (370 km) offshore in the mid-1970s, and, because a significant part of the area fished by other EU members lies within British waters, it has been necessary to regulate catches on a community-wide basis. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom has lost opportunities to fish in some more-distant waters (e.g., those off Iceland), and this has reduced its total catch more than those of other countries of the EU. The United Kingdom’s fishing industry now supplies only half the country’s total demand. The most important fish landed are cod, haddock, mackerel, whiting, and plaice, as well as shellfish, including Nephrops (Norway lobsters), lobsters, crabs, and oysters. Estuarine fish farming—mainly of trout and salmon—has expanded considerably.

Resources and power

Minerals

The United Kingdom has relatively limited supplies of economically valuable mineral resources. The once-important extraction of iron ore has dwindled to almost nothing. Other important metals that are mined include tin, which supplies about half the domestic demand, and zinc. There are adequate supplies of nonmetallic minerals, including sand and gravel, limestone, dolomite, chalk, slate, barite, talc, clay and clay shale, kaolin (china clay), ball clay, fuller’s earth, celestine, and gypsum. Sand, gravel, limestone, and other crushed rocks are quarried for use in construction.

Energy

By contrast, the United Kingdom has larger energy resources—including oil, natural gas, and coal—than any other EU member. Coal, the fuel once vital to the British economy, has continued to decrease in importance. Compared with its peak year of 1913, when more than one million workers produced more than 300 million tons, current output has fallen by more than four-fifths, with an even greater reduction in the labour force. Power stations are the major customers for coal, but, with growth in the use of other fuels and the increasing closing of pits that have become uneconomical to operate, the industry remains under considerable pressure.

The discovery of oil in the North Sea and the apportionment of its area to surrounding countries led to the rapid development of oil exploitation. Since the start of production in 1975, the quantities brought ashore have grown each year, and the United Kingdom has become virtually self-sufficient in oil and even an exporter. With an average output of nearly three million barrels per day at the beginning of the 21st century, the country was one of the world’s largest producers. The balance of payments has benefited considerably from oil revenues, and a substantial proportion has been invested abroad to offset diminishing oil income in the future. Proven reserves were estimated at around 700 million tons in the late 1990s.

Since offshore natural gas supplies from the North Sea began to be available in quantity in 1967, they have replaced the previously coal-based supplies of town gas. A national network of distribution pipelines has been created. Proven reserves of natural gas were estimated at 26.8 trillion cubic feet (760 billion cubic metres) in the late 1990s.

Self-sufficiency in oil and natural gas and the decline of coal mining has transformed Britain’s energy sector. Nuclear fuel has slightly expanded its contribution to electricity generation, and hydroelectric power contributes a small proportion (mainly in Scotland), but conventional steam power stations provide most of the country’s electricity.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing sector as a whole has continued to shrink both in employment and in its contribution (now around one-fifth) to the GDP. The decline in manufacturing largely accounted for the rapid rise in unemployment in the early 1980s. Once economic growth returned, however, there was great improvement in productivity and profits in British manufacturing.

In terms of their relative importance to the GDP, the most important manufacturing industries are engineering; food, beverages (including alcoholic beverages), and tobacco; chemicals; paper, printing, and publishing; metals and minerals; and textiles, clothing, footwear, and leather. The fastest-growing sectors have been chemicals and electrical engineering. Within the chemical industry, pharmaceuticals and specialty products have shown the largest increases. Within the engineering industry, electrical and instrument engineering and transport engineering—including motor vehicles and aerospace equipment—have grown faster than mechanical engineering and metal goods, and electronic products have shown the fastest growth. On the other hand, the growth in motor vehicle production has occurred among foreign-owned, especially Japanese, companies investing in the United Kingdom. British automobile manufacturers have been in decline since the 1970s. After a period of restructuring during the 1980s, the British steel industry substantially increased its productivity, output, and exports during the 1990s. However, food, beverages, tobacco, leather, and engineering as a whole have had below-average growth. Textiles, clothing, and footwear have been in absolute decline because British companies have faced increasing difficulty competing with imports, especially from Asia.

During the 1980s imports of manufactured products increased dramatically, and, although exports of finished manufactured products increased in value, the surplus in the balance of trade disappeared and was transformed into a large deficit. Nevertheless, after a period of restructuring in the 1980s, Britain’s manufacturing sector increased its productivity and competitiveness, and the trade balance improved and stabilized during the 1990s.

Construction in Britain stagnated during the 1990s because of a decline in prices and in demand for new housing and because of decreased government investment in infrastructure during the first half of the decade. About half the labour force in construction is self-employed. More than half of all construction work is on new projects, the remainder on repair and maintenance. There has been a marked switch from housing funded and owned by public authorities toward private development. Considerable efforts have also been made to encourage tenants of publicly owned rented houses to become owner-occupiers, with the result that the proportion of owner-occupied homes has grown considerably since the early 1970s. The supply of privately rented accommodations became scarcer because of statutory rent controls that discouraged new construction, but changes during the 1980s both in the economic climate and in official policy began to stimulate the supply. The average price of a new house, particularly in London and the South East, has generally continued to increase more rapidly than the prevailing rate of inflation, although prices have fluctuated considerably. In turn, the rising price of new homes has created considerable pressure on the land available for housing, which has been relatively tightly controlled. Here, too, public policy has been changing in favour of greater permissiveness.

Private industrial and commercial construction and public projects account for the remainder of construction. During the 1980s and ’90s the United Kingdom embarked on a series of major infrastructure projects, including the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France, the rebuilding of large parts of London’s traditional Docklands as a new commercial centre, and extensions to London’s rail and Underground systems.

Finance

The United Kingdom, particularly London, has traditionally been a world financial centre. Restructuring and deregulation transformed the sector during the 1980s and ’90s, with important changes in banking, insurance, the London Stock Exchange, shipping, and commodity markets. Some long-standing distinctions between financial institutions have become less clear-cut. For example, housing loans used to be primarily the responsibility of building societies, but increasingly banks and insurance companies have entered this area of lending. Two related developments have occurred: the transformation of building-society branch offices into virtual banks with personal cashing facilities and the diversification of all three of these types of institutions into real estate services. Building societies also participate to a limited extent in investment services, insurance, trusteeship, executorship, and land services.

At the end of the 20th century, the financial services industry employed more than one million people and contributed about one-twelfth of the GDP. Although financial services have grown rapidly in some medium-sized cities, notably Leeds and Edinburgh, London has continued to dominate the industry and has grown in size and influence as a centre of international financial operations. Capital flows have increased, as have foreign exchange and securities trading. Consequently, London has more foreign banks than any other city in the world. Increased competition and technological developments have accelerated change. The International Stock Exchange was reorganized, and the historical two-tier structure of brokers, who executed investors’ instructions to buy and sell stocks and shares, and jobbers, who “made” markets in these securities, was abolished. As a result, new companies link British and foreign banks with former brokers and jobbers. The Financial Services Act of 1986, the Building Societies Act of 1987, and the Banking Act of 1987 regulate these new financial organizations. In 1997 the government established a Financial Services Authority (FSA) to regulate the financial services industry; it replaced a series of separate supervisory organizations, some of them based on self-regulation. Among other tasks, the FSA has taken over the supervision of the United Kingdom’s commercial banks from the Bank of England.

The Bank of England retains the sole right to issue bank notes in England and Wales (banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland have limited rights to do this in their own areas). In 1997 the Bank of England was given the power to set the “repo,” or benchmark, interest rate, which influences the general structure of interest rates. The bank’s standing instruction from the government is to set an interest rate that will meet a target inflation rate of 2.5 percent per annum. The bank also intervenes actively in foreign exchange markets and acts as the government’s banker. The pound sterling is a major internationally traded currency.

A variety of institutions, including insurance companies, pension funds, and investment and unit trusts, channel individual savings into investments. Finance houses are the primary providers of home mortgages and corporate lending and leasing. There are also companies that finance the leasing of business equipment; factoring companies that provide immediate cash to creditors and subsequently collect the corporate debts owed; and finance corporations that provide venture capital funding for innovations or high-risk companies and that supplement the medium- and long-term capital markets, otherwise supplied by the banks or the Stock Market.

The United Kingdom has a number of organized financial markets. The securities markets comprise the International Stock Exchange, which deals in officially listed stocks and shares (including government issues, traded options, stock index options, and currency options); the Unlisted Securities Market, for smaller companies; and the Third Market, for small unlisted companies. Money market activities include the trading of bills, certificates of deposit, short-term deposits, and, increasingly, sterling commercial paper. Other markets are those dealing in Eurocurrency, Eurobonds, foreign exchange, financial futures, gold, ship brokerage, freight futures, and agricultural and other commodity futures.

The share of invisible trade (receipts and payments from financial services; interest, profits, and dividends; and transfers between the United Kingdom and other countries) has been rising steadily since the 1960s—from about one-third to one-half of the country’s total foreign earnings. Within this area, service transactions have grown rapidly, and financial services have grown the fastest.

Trade

Trade has long been pivotal to the United Kingdom’s economy. The total value of imports and exports represents nearly half the country’s GDP. (By comparison, the value of foreign trade amounts to about one-fifth of the GDP of the United States.) The volume of both the exports and the imports of the United Kingdom has grown steadily in recent years. Principal British exports include machinery, automobiles and other transport equipment, electrical and electronic equipment (including computers), chemicals, and oil. Services, particularly financial services, are another major export and contribute positively to Britain’s trade balance. The country imports about one-tenth of its foodstuffs and about one-third of its machinery and transport equipment.

An increasing share of the United Kingdom’s trade is with other developed countries. Joining the European Economic Community caused a major reorientation of trade flows; more than half of all trade is now with European partners, although at the beginning of the 21st century the United States remained the United Kingdom’s single largest export market and its second largest supplier. Germany was the leading supplier and the second most important export market.

The United Kingdom’s current overall balance of payments (including trade in services and transfer payments), which historically had been generally favourable, fell into deficit from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s because visible imports (i.e., tangible goods imported) exceeded visible exports. Meanwhile there was considerable overseas investment, and foreign earnings grew. The government has supported trade liberalization and participated in international trade organizations. By the late 1990s the steady growth in exports of goods and services and in foreign earnings had produced the first balance-of-payments surplus in more than a decade.

Services

The most remarkable economic development in the United Kingdom has been the growth of service industries, which now provide about two-thirds of the GDP and three-fourths of total employment. This reflects the rise in real personal incomes, changes in patterns of consumer expenditure, and the elaboration and increasing outsourcing of business services. Although some services—for example, public transportation, laundries, and movie theatres—have declined in favour of privately owned goods—such as automobiles, washing machines, and television sets—this has stimulated increased demand for the related services that distribute, maintain, and repair such products. Other growing service industries include hotels and catering, air travel and other leisure-related activities, distribution (particularly retailing), and finance. Especially rapid growth has occurred in other business-support services, including computing systems and software, management consultancy, advertising, and market research, as well as the provision of exhibition and conference facilities. Britain is also the base for some of the world’s leading art auction houses.

The United Kingdom’s many cultural treasures—e.g., its historic castles, museums, and theatres—make it a popular tourist destination. The tourism industry is a leading sector in the British economy, and each year more than 25 million tourists visit the country. London is among the world’s most-visited cities.

Labour and taxation

Government revenues are derived from several main sources, including income taxes, corporate taxes, taxes on the sale of goods and services, and national insurance contributions. After World War II the government adopted individual income tax rates that were among the highest in Europe. During the last two decades of the 20th century, individual income tax rates dropped, and corporate tax rates increased slightly. A value-added tax, which levies a 17.5 percent tax on purchases, generates nearly one-third of government revenues.

During the 1980s the Thatcher government adopted policies that placed limits on the power and influence of trade unions and provided training for those entering the workforce or changing careers. The Labour government of the late 1990s retained many of Thatcher’s policies, but they abandoned the Conservative objective of unlimited tax reduction and instead sought to stabilize the overall burden of taxation at about 37 percent of GDP.

Just under half the total population is in the labour force, including a small but expanding proportion who are self-employed. About three-tenths of workers are members of a trade union, a share that dropped significantly with the adoption of legislation restricting trade union rights in the last two decades of the 20th century. Among the various influential trade organizations are the public-sector union Unison; the manufacturing-sector union Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union, and the general-services unions General, Municipal, and Boilermakers’ Union and Transport and General Workers’ Union. Although manufacturing once dominated employment, it now involves less than one-sixth of all workers. In contrast, the service sector employs more than two-thirds of employees, with financial services and distribution the two largest components.

Transportation and telecommunications

The United Kingdom, which is relatively small in area and has a fairly high population density, has undergone considerable change in its patterns of transport. The growth of automobile ownership (by the turn of the 21st century, nearly two-thirds of all households had one automobile, and some had two or more), the decline in the use of local buses, and the transfer of much internal freight from rail to road increased the importance of maintaining and developing road networks, particularly motorways (superhighways) and trunk roads. Intercity rail services have been improved, as have commuter services in major metropolitan areas. Similarly, air traffic has grown, particularly international flights. Although there has been a downward trend in shipping and sea travel, most foreign trade still moves by sea. However, the opening of the Channel Tunnel rail link between England and France in 1994 had a big impact on cross-Channel passenger and freight patterns. At peak periods the tunnel accommodates up to four passenger and four freight shuttletrains per hour in each direction. By the end of the decade, these trains carried about half of the car traffic and more than one-third of the coach and truck traffic on the Dover/Folkestone–Calais route—the principal artery linking Britain to mainland Europe. In addition, the tunnel accommodates through freight trains and high-speed passenger trains between London and Paris or Brussels. Substantial passenger and cargo traffic moves by sea between the ports of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Europe. Oil and natural gas, each of which has a national bulk-distribution pipeline system, do not rely on the road and rail networks.

Investment in transportation has sometimes failed to meet rising demand—for example, the M25 motorway around London showed signs of overload soon after it was opened in 1986; there is overcrowding on commuter rail services, including London’s Underground; congested traffic moves at a snail’s pace in cities; and there is continuous pressure to build more motorways and airports to serve London.

During the 1980s British Telecom (BT) was privatized, and the government subsequently deregulated the country’s telecommunications sector. Although BT has continued to be the largest telecommunications company, several additional operators provide extensive service for cable, wireless, fibre-optic, and other telecommunications services. An independent regulatory agency, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), oversees the sector.

Britain from 1914 to the present

The political situation

World War I

The British declaration of war on Germany on Aug. 4, 1914, brought an end to the threat of civil war in Ireland, which since March had occupied Prime Minister H.H. Asquith’s Liberal cabinet almost to the exclusion of everything else. Formally at least, party warfare came to an end. The Conservatives agreed not to contest by-elections and to support the government in matters pertaining to the war.

The Asquith coalition

Such compromises were easy to make in autumn 1914, when the excitement over the outbreak of war was high, causing a crush of enlistments, and when it was still generally believed that the war would be over within six months. By spring 1915, however, enthusiasm for the war began to cool and recruiting fell off. Moreover, Asquith’s government seemed to have lost its grip on affairs; newspapers carried reports of an inadequate supply of ammunition on the Western Front, and on May 15 the first sea lord, Adm. John Fisher, resigned. The Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, under pressure from his followers to take a stronger stand, announced that his party would demand a debate on the conduct of the war. Asquith quickly offered to form a coalition, thereby ending the last Liberal government. The coalition consisted of Liberals, Conservatives, and one Labourite.

In the new cabinet, announced on May 25, Arthur James Balfour replaced Winston Churchill as first lord of the Admiralty. More important, a new department, the Ministry of Munitions, was established with the Liberal David Lloyd George at its head.

The coalition, which was supposed to allay tension among parties over the conduct of the war, worked badly. Although the Ministry of Munitions did indeed resolve the armament crisis surprisingly quickly, dissatisfaction with Asquith’s relaxed management of affairs continued and centred in the autumn of 1915 upon the rising demand, in the press and among the Conservatives, for compulsory military service. With apparent reluctance, the prime minister allowed an inadequate measure for the conscription of unmarried men to be passed in January 1916. But it was not until May 1916, after more controversy and threats of resignation, that a comprehensive bill was passed for compulsory enlistment of all men between ages 18 and 41.

Meanwhile, on April 24, 1916, Monday of Easter Week, a rebellion broke out in Dublin directed at securing Irish independence. Violence was suppressed within six days, and the surviving rebels were arrested amid general derision from the Irish population. But Britain’s punishment of the rebels, including 14 summary executions, quickly turned Irish sympathy toward the men, who were now regarded as martyrs. The Easter Rising was the beginning of the Irish war for independence.

Even though the rebellion was quelled, the problems of Ireland needed to be addressed. Prime Minister Asquith called upon Lloyd George to try to arrange for an immediate grant of Home Rule to be shared by the Irish nationalist and unionist parties (the former being fully committed to the principle of Home Rule, the latter only partially). Although a compromise was in fact reached, discontent among senior unionists prevented a bill from going forward. Thereafter Home Rule ceased to be an issue because southern Ireland now wanted nothing but independence. Asquith was further weakened.

The government also drew criticism for its war policies. For one, Britain was unable to help Romania when it declared war upon the Central Powers in the summer of 1916. More significantly, Britain launched its first major independent military operation, the Battle of the Somme (July 1 to Nov. 13, 1916), with disastrous results. On the first day of battle, the British suffered almost 60,000 casualties. Although little of strategic significance was accomplished, the battle brought the reality of war home to Britain. (For details on the military aspects of the war, see World War I.) Dissatisfaction with the government mounted until, in the first week of December, Asquith and most of the senior Liberal ministers were forced to resign. Lloyd George became prime minister with a cabinet consisting largely of Conservatives.

Lloyd George

Lloyd George governed Britain with a small “War Cabinet” of five permanent members, only one of whom was a politician of standing. Although Lloyd George had to take note of the opinions of Parliament and of those around him and pay attention to the tides of public political sentiment, the power to make decisions rested entirely with him. He was faced with the same sentiments of apathy, discontent with the country’s leadership, and war weariness that had brought down the Asquith government. Not only had Britain’s supreme military effort in 1916 failed, but the war had lost its meaning. The British commitment to defend Belgium (which had brought Britain into the war in the first place) was forgotten, still more the Austro-Hungarian actions against Serbia (which had not particularly troubled Britain anyway). Thus, in the next two years, Lloyd George set out to reinvest the war with meaning. Its purpose would be to create a better Britain and a safer world. Victory promised hope for the future. Toward that goal he established new ministries and brought workingmen into government. Lloyd George’s reconstruction program was built on principles that were later enunciated by U.S. Pres.Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points and his slogan of ‘‘making the world safe for democracy.’’ Lloyd George’s own slogan of 1918 was ‘‘to forge a nation fit for heroes to live in.’’

Lloyd George controlled the government but not the Liberal Party; only a minority of Liberals in the House of Commons supported him, the rest remaining loyal to Asquith. Worse, Lloyd George had no party organization in the country. The division within the Liberal Party hardened during the controversy over a statement he made in April 1918 concerning the strength of troops in France. Although this controversy, the so-called Maurice Debate (which took place on May 9), strengthened Lloyd George temporarily, it also made clear his dependence upon the Conservatives. Soon afterward, in the summer of 1918, he began to plan what he expected to be a wartime general election to be entered into in coalition with the Conservatives. The sudden armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, however, intervened, and the wartime election became a victory election. Meanwhile, the Labour Party had withdrawn its support from the coalition and called upon Labour members to resign. Most, but not all, did.

Between the wars

The election of 1918

The general election of Dec. 14, 1918, was a landmark in 20th-century British history and may have helped to set the course of politics through the interwar period. To begin, the Representation of the People Act of 1918, which gave the vote to all men over age 21 and all women over age 30 and removed the property disqualifications of the older household franchise, tripled the electorate. Ironically, the election registered the lowest voter turnout of any election in the 20th century, reflecting in part the teething troubles of the Labour Party, whose share of the vote was only 20 percent. Further, 37 seats were added to the House of Commons. Even though the coalition was returned to office, the real winners of the election were the Conservatives. Lloyd George’s Liberals and the Conservatives, who had arranged not to contest seats against each other, together won 473 of the 707 seats. Liberals loyal to Lloyd George won 127 seats, while the Asquithian Liberal Party was nearly wiped out, returning only 36 members as compared with the Labour Party’s 57. (Similarly, the old Irish Nationalist Party was destroyed and replaced by Sinn Féin, the party of independence.) Thus, despite the coalition’s overwhelming victory, Lloyd George remained dependent on the Conservatives. The Liberal organization in the country was in shambles. Finally, the election had focused not upon the reconstruction of Britain, as the leaders of each party had intended, but on the punishment of Germany after the war, a matter the government had hoped to defer. The election had committed the British government to a harsh peace.

Harsh peace and hard times

The peace treaty with Germany—drawn up far too rapidly and without German participation, between January and May 1919—went into effect on June 28. Even as peace with Germany was declared, the British people, as well as members of the government, were beginning to realize that the punitive treaty, burdening Germany with the responsibility and much of the cost of the war, was a mistake. Accordingly, British foreign policy for much of the decade of the 1920s aimed at rehabilitating Germany and bringing it back into the family of nations. In general, this attempt was opposed by France and resulted in a rupture between Britain and its wartime ally, forcing France into a position of isolation that would have prodigious consequences for Europe and indeed for the rest of the world with the rise of Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s.

Lloyd George spent a great deal of time in the four postwar years of his administration on foreign affairs. As a consequence, issues within the United Kingdom, such as unemployment, poor housing, Irish separatism, and the revival of industry, were too frequently neglected. Many of the promises for reconstruction made in speeches and papers during the war were never carried out. The government, however, tried to diminish the habitual confrontation between newly powerful organized labour and industry. Unemployment insurance was extended to virtually all workers, and a serious attempt was made to begin a public housing program. Railroads were reorganized, and for three years after the war coal mines remained in public hands. This restructuring of industry, however, came to an end with the serious rise in unemployment that began in 1920 and culminated in 1921 in a full-scale industrial depression with nearly one-fourth of the labour force out of work. One of the factors in the depression was a disastrous coal strike in April 1921, caused in considerable measure by the collapse of world coal prices resulting from German coal reparations to France. The immediate effect of the economic depression was a demand by the Conservatives for government economy that the prime minister could not ignore.

Ireland and the return of the Conservatives

In 1919 revolutionary disorder broke out in the south of Ireland when the provisional government of Ireland, organized by the Sinn Féin party, began guerrilla military operations against the British administration. Through 1920 the British government attempted to put down violence with violence, while passing an act allowing Home Rule for both the south of Ireland and for Ulster. The six Protestant unionist counties of the north accepted Home Rule and in 1921 set up in Belfast an autonomous government. In the 26 counties of the south, Home Rule was defiantly rejected. By the spring of 1921, however, with the Belfast government in operation and with demands both in Britain and in the rest of the world that the fighting in Ireland come to an end, compromise became possible. In the summer a truce was arranged, and on Dec. 6, 1921, after prolonged negotiations, the British government and the Irish rebels signed a so-called treaty allowing the establishment of what was, in effect, a dominion government in Dublin.

Lloyd George’s insistence that the Irish be granted the substance, if not the letter, of their demands, as well as the clearly declining popularity of the coalition government, caused general unhappiness, not among the Conservative leadership but among the members of the Conservative back bench in the House of Commons. Finally, in October 1922, when the proposal to join forces in a second coalition election was decisively rejected, largely by the Conservative rank and file, the Conservative Party withdrew from the coalition. Lloyd George resigned on October 20, and George V invited the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, to form a government. On Nov. 15, 1922, the hastily established Conservative government won a solid victory in a general election. The decline of the Liberal Party was confirmed by the fact that the two wings of the party together returned only 116 members of Parliament compared with Labour’s 142.

The Baldwin era

Law remained prime minister only until May 20, 1923, when, ill with cancer, he resigned. He was succeeded by an almost unknown politician, Stanley Baldwin, who would nonetheless dominate British politics until his resignation from his third government, in May 1937. Baldwin seemed an unlikely leader for a major party; he had been in Parliament for 15 years without making a mark. Yet behind the unassuming demeanour was a crafty politician. Baldwin understood, as perhaps his predecessors had not, that the British voter, certainly the middle-class voter, desired not excitement and reform but tranquillity. Nostalgia for the assumed stability of prewar Britain was strong and indeed a key to the politics of the 1920s. This frame of mind would contrast sharply with Britain’s mood after World War II.

The new Conservative government was faced with high unemployment, industrial stagnation, foreign debts, and continuing demand for economy in government. Baldwin’s response was to abandon Britain’s historic policy of free trade and to return to import duties. Although he was supported in this by a majority of his party, he nonetheless promised to hold an election on the subject before implementing such a policy. Consequently, on Dec. 6, 1923, a second election was held in which the Conservatives lost their comfortable majority; indeed, though they controlled the largest number of seats (258) in the House of Commons, the now-united Liberal Party (159) and Labour (191) combined to win a majority. As a result, on Jan. 22, 1924, the first Labour government in British history, under Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, came to power with Liberal support.

MacDonald remained in office only nine months and accomplished little except the revival of the public housing program abandoned by the Lloyd George administration under Conservative pressure. During his time in office he was continually charged in the House of Commons and in the newspapers with unseemly weakness toward the Bolshevik government of the Soviet Union and with an unwillingness to deal firmly with purported revolutionary socialist conspiracies within the United Kingdom. Over this matter the Liberals finally turned against him, and on Oct. 29, 1924, in an election dominated by charges of Soviet influence, MacDonald was heavily defeated. Baldwin returned to the prime ministership, backed by a majority of more than two to one over Labour and the Liberals combined. The Liberal representation in the House of Commons was reduced to 40.

Baldwin’s return to office coincided with the French evacuation of the Ruhr valley in Germany and the revival of Germany as an economic power. In the nearly five years of the second Baldwin government, Britain experienced relative economic prosperity, although unemployment never went below the 10 percent of the working population covered by unemployment insurance. A new collapse in domestic coal prices, however, caused by the revival of German coal mining, produced the threat of a second strike by British coal miners. It erupted in May 1926 with a walkout in the coal industry and a sympathy strike by the rest of Britain’s organized labour. Except as a monument in the history of British labour, however, this so-called general strike is as unimportant as it was unsuccessful. As a general strike, it lasted only 10 days, from May 3 to May 12. The miners themselves held out for nearly eight months and were finally starved into returning as winter began, at lower wages and with longer hours. Economically, the chief effect of the strike was to hasten the decay of the huge British coal industry. However, Baldwin’s handling of it—he prepared emergency services but then did nothing—greatly increased his popularity; indeed, he is remembered as a peacemaker, although his government passed an act declaring general strikes to be revolutionary and hence illegal. Yet beyond that his administration, particularly the ministry of health under Neville Chamberlain, accomplished a good deal; it vastly extended old-age pensions and pensions for widows and orphans, reformed local government, and, finally, in 1928, extended the franchise to women ages 21 to 30 on the same terms as those for men.

Baldwin dissolved the House of Commons in the spring of 1929, expecting to be returned. Instead, on May 30 MacDonald’s Labour Party received 288 seats compared with the Conservative Party’s 260, with the Liberals again holding the balance of power, with 59 seats. Thus, MacDonald formed his second government, again with Liberal consent, if not support. The Liberals could do little else. In 1924 Labour, by its inaction, had proved itself as a responsible rather than a revolutionary party. In the minds of Britons, Labour had replaced the Liberals as the natural alternative party.

Baldwin and the abdication crisis

Political events in the interwar years must always be seen in the context of the Great Depression, which set in internationally after the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929. In Britain, in addition to disruption to the financial system and the stability of sterling, there was a rapid acceleration in unemployment from the late 1920s, so that by the spring of 1931, 25 percent of the workforce was unemployed. The country was still in the aftermath of economic depression when, in June 1935, Baldwin rather abruptly took over the prime ministership from MacDonald, whose health was clearly failing. A general election followed on November 14, in which the Conservatives returned 432 members to Parliament to Labour’s 154. But because the so-called National Liberals and a few remaining National Labour members still participated in the government, it was technically a coalition. With the onset of World War II in 1939, this election was to be the last British general election for nearly a decade. Hence, Baldwin, in his final 18 months of office, presided over the beginnings of Britain’s appeasement policy and over the more spectacular but less important abdication of the new king, Edward VIII, who had ascended the throne on Jan. 20, 1936, upon the death of his father, George V.

In the quarter century since his father’s accession, Edward, as prince of Wales, had become the most public and best-known heir to the throne since his grandfather, Edward VII. But, unknown to the British public, some years before his accession he had fallen in love with an American, Wallis Simpson, who was then married to a British subject, Ernest Simpson. Edward decided to marry her, and in 1936, after his accession, Wallis Simpson began divorce proceedings against her husband. Baldwin, well before his actual confrontations with the king, had determined that Edward could not marry Mrs. Simpson and remain monarch. He warned the king not to attempt to influence public opinion or to try to remain on the throne. The temper of the people and of Parliament was against Edward. Eventually, on Dec. 11, 1936, he announced his abdication in a poignant radio broadcast and left Great Britain. Baldwin had triumphed. The king was succeeded by his younger brother, who became George VI and who had an eminently suitable family, including two young daughters. After George VI’s coronation on May 12, 1937, Baldwin resigned, amid every sign of popular affection; he was succeeded on May 28 by Neville Chamberlain.

Foreign policy and appeasement

Chamberlain, rather than Baldwin, has always been regarded as the man of appeasement. Historically this is correct only in the sense that Chamberlain formulated a policy of accommodation with Germany and Italy. But Chamberlain was also the man who began British rearmament, pronounced appeasement a failure, and declared war upon Germany. Baldwin was equally zealous to avoid any sort of confrontation with the European dictators while doing as little as possible to strengthen Britain’s armed forces.

Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in Germany on Jan. 30, 1933, occasioned only the slightest interest in Britain. Little was known of him. It was usually assumed that he was a tool of the right or the army and in any case would not remain in office long. This illusion began to shatter in January 1935, when Germany overwhelmingly won a plebiscite in the Saar River basin; the Saarlanders voted to return their area to Germany, from which it had been separated by the Treaty of Versailles as part of German reparations, rather than remaining with France. This was an enormous boost to Hitler’s prestige, as well as a confirmation of the attraction of Nazi Germany and, by the same token, a setback for France and the idea of democracy.

On the wave of popularity the plebiscite brought, Hitler reintroduced military conscription in Germany and announced the creation of the Luftwaffe (the German air force), both in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. In response, the former wartime allies and guarantors of the peace treaty, Britain, France, and Italy, met at Stresa, Italy, in April and there discussed collective action to uphold the disarmament terms of the treaty; this understanding became known as the Stresa Front. Its maintenance, specifically the challenge of keeping Italy a foe of Germany, formed the motivation for Britain’s foreign policy for the next 18 months; in effect it was the beginnings of appeasement. In August 1935 Italy attacked the empire of Ethiopia in Africa, announcing that it had apprised Britain and France at Stresa of its intentions of doing so. British public opinion was torn between a desire to avoid war and an unwillingness to sanction unprovoked aggression. The compromise was a retreat to the fiction of “collective security,” which meant a dependence upon action by the League of Nations in Geneva. Support for the League of Nations became the Conservative position on foreign policy in the general election of November 1935.

Britain at this time remained interested in pursuing friendship with Italy. Immediately after the election the British foreign secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, and the French premier, Pierre Laval, put together a plan for the rescue of part of Ethiopia that required the cession of certain areas to Italy. This plan found its way into the press, provoking a general denunciation of compromise with evil. Hoare had to resign, and the first attempt at appeasement failed. By the spring of 1936, with the League of Nations still debating what to do about Italian aggression—specifically, whether to impose sanctions on oil—resistance in Ethiopia collapsed. Meanwhile, on March 7, Hitler took advantage of the disarray in the west and broke the first of the territorial clauses of the Treaty of Versailles by sending troops into the Rhineland, the German territory to the west of the Rhine River bordering on Belgium and The Netherlands.

The Rhineland occupation turned the balance of power in Europe toward Germany and against the west. Although in Britain there was virtually no reaction—after all, it was German territory—the effect on France, particularly on the French army command, was devastating. As a consequence, France virtually gave up the unilateral direction of its foreign affairs. Diplomatic initiative rested entirely in London. Now that it was too late, the 15-year rupture between Britain and France came to an end.

In July 1936 revolution against the Republican government of Spain broke out, led by conservative forces within the Spanish army under the command of Gen. Francisco Franco. It quickly became apparent that the revolutionaries were supported by Italy and, to a lesser extent, Germany, not only with money and arms but also with men. The British reaction, adopted also by the French, was peculiar. Although, according to public opinion polls begun in 1937, less than 3 percent of the British population favoured a Francoist victory, British policy was to forbid the supply of arms to either side. By this policy of nonintervention the British and the French avoided involvement in war against Franco and by implication against the Italian government. The pursuit of friendship with Italy could continue. Meanwhile, the democratic Spanish government was unable to buy arms from the Western democracies. Franco eventually triumphed in the spring of 1939. (See also Spanish Civil War.)

Chamberlain was determined to continue the policy of accommodation with Italy. He was convinced that at some point it could be reunited with the Western allies and the Stresa Front could be recreated. Italian leader Benito Mussolini and officials of his government gave many private intimations that this might be possible. But at the same time Chamberlain was determined to pursue a general policy of European settlement that would include Germany. The prime minister and many Britons felt that Germany had been badly treated by the Treaty of Versailles and that the principle of self-determination dictated that German minorities in other countries should not be prevented from joining Germany if they clearly chose to do so. Hence, when Germany overran the Austrian republic in March 1938 and incorporated the small state into the Reich (see Anschluss), Britain took no action. Similarly, when almost immediately Hitler began to denounce what he characterized as the Czech persecutions of the militant German minority in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain searched for a means not to prevent the Czech borderland from being transferred to Germany but to ensure that it was accomplished peacefully. Because Czechoslovakia had a military alliance with France, war would surely result if it resisted the Germans and called upon French aid.

The attempted settlement of the Sudeten crisis, culminating in the Munich Agreement, was the climax of the appeasement policy. Between Sept. 15 and 30, 1938, Chamberlain traveled to Germany three times to meet Hitler. From the last meeting, held at Munich on September 30, he took back what he believed to be an agreement that the German portions of Czechoslovakia constituted Hitler’s last territorial claim in Europe and that Germany, as well as Britain, would renounce war as a means of settling international claims. He had, he said with some pride, brought “peace for our time.”

Chamberlain’s policy failed because he believed that Hitler sincerely aimed only at reuniting Germans, whereas in fact Hitler’s appetite for territory, particularly to the east, was unlimited. On March 15, 1939, the German army, virtually without warning, occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia, even though it was not inhabited by Germans. On March 18 Chamberlain, distinctly angry, made an announcement that amounted to the end of appeasement; in the following weeks Britain offered a guarantee of Polish territory (where Hitler would clearly be looking next), signed a military alliance with Poland, and undertook serious preparation for war, including the first peacetime military conscription.

World War II

The Polish crisis precipitated the war. Through the summer of 1939, German propaganda grew more strident, demanding cession to Germany of the city of Gdańsk (Danzig) while gradually escalating demands for special rights in, and finally annexation of, the Polish corridor. Because the only country able to defend Poland was the Soviet Union, a British-French mission in the summer of 1939 began negotiations for a treaty with Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin. Poland, however, announced that it would not allow Soviet troops to enter Polish territory, even for the purpose of defending the country against Germany. Hitler put a stop to these negotiations on August 23 when he announced the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. On September 1 German troops invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3.

The phases of war

From the British perspective, World War II fell readily into three distinct phases. The first, the so-called phony war and the period of German victories in the west, ended with the decision of France on June 18, 1940, to ask for an armistice with Germany. The second, heroic phase, when Britain stood alone, began with the battle for survival in the air over the British Isles and ended in the first week of December 1941 with the successful Soviet defense of Moscow after Hitler’s attack on June 22 and with the Japanese declaration of war on the United States and the British Empire on December 7. Then followed what Churchill termed the period of the Grand Alliance, lasting from December 1941 until Germany’s capitulation in May 1945.

Perhaps the most important event of the first phase was the announcement on Sept. 3, 1939, that Churchill, assumed to have reached the end of his career in 1936 as a result of his having embraced the king’s cause during the abdication crisis, would reenter the government as first lord of the admiralty. Churchill thus was in charge of the Royal Navy on April 9 and 10, 1940, when Hitler without warning overran Denmark and Norway, greatly extending his northern flank and virtually destroying the naval blockade of Germany that had been established at the beginning of the war.

The Norwegian campaign destroyed the Chamberlain government. The obviously poor planning and the incapacity of the British forces in an area where the Germans were at a serious disadvantage caused a rebellion within the Conservative Party. A bitter debate lasting from May 7 to May 9, 1940, resulted in Chamberlain’s resignation the next day. Although Churchill himself, as first lord of the admiralty, was heavily involved and did not attempt to deny his responsibility, Chamberlain quickly discovered that the coalition government he hoped to establish with either himself or Lord Halifax as prime minister could, at the insistence of the Labour Party, be headed only by Churchill. Thus, on May 10 Churchill was announced as prime minister. Chamberlain, to his immense credit, consented to remain in the cabinet and to control, on Churchill’s behalf, the Conservative Party.

On the same day, May 10, 1940, the German army struck in the west against The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. France held out for just 38 days. (Listen to an excerpt of Churchill’s first address to the House of Commons as prime minister, on May 13, 1940.) When on June 18 the French government resolved to ask for an armistice, Churchill announced on the radio that Britain would fight on alone; it would be the nation’s “finest hour.” So began the second phase of World War II for Britain. Through August and September 1940 Britain’s fate depended upon 800 fighter airplanes and upon Churchill’s resolution during the terrific bombardment that became the Battle of Britain. In the last six months of 1940, some 23,000 civilians were killed, and yet the country held on. (For contemporary descriptions of the devastation of London, see BTW: London Classics: London in World War II.)

Perhaps the important political lesson of World War II lay in the realization that a democratic country, with a centuries-old tradition of individual liberty, could with popular consent be mobilized for a gigantic national effort. The compulsory employment of labour became universal for both men and women. In 1943 Britain was devoting 54 percent of its gross national product to the war. Medical services were vastly extended. Civilian consumption was reduced to 80 percent of the prewar level. Yet by and large the political tensions that had accompanied an equally desperate war 25 years before did not appear. Politics, as opposed to the direction of the war, certainly for the voters, became almost irrelevant. There was some parliamentary criticism of Churchill’s leadership, but public approval, at least as measured by repeated opinion polls, hardly wavered. Nonetheless, the idea of a ‘‘united’’ country was overplayed then, and, in the eyes of some, has been overplayed since. The old divisions of class and gender were never far below the surface, and it is only with considerable qualification that World War II can be called the People’s War.

Political developments

German hostilities in the west ended at midnight on May 8, 1945. Six months earlier Churchill had promised in the House of Commons that he would ask the king to dissolve the sitting Parliament, elected in 1935, soon after the German surrender unless the Labour and Liberal parties seriously desired to continue the coalition government. Accordingly, he began conversations with Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, in the middle of May, proposing that Labour remain in the coalition until Japan surrendered, an event he estimated to be at least 18 months away. Churchill believed Attlee to have been initially sympathetic, but other members of the Labour Party pressed for departure. As a result, Churchill dissolved the government on May 23, appointed a new, single-party Conservative government, and set election day for July 5. Because it was necessary to count the military vote, the results could not be announced until July 26.

Considering that the leading figures in each party had been cabinet colleagues only a few weeks before, the electoral campaign was remarkably bitter. Largely on the advice of William Maxwell Aitken, Baron Beaverbrook, the Conservatives focused chiefly on Churchill himself as the man who had won the war. Churchill denounced Labour as the party of socialism and perhaps of totalitarianism while promising strong leadership and grand but unspecific measures of social reform. Labour, even though the war in the Pacific continued, concentrated on peacetime reconstruction and fair shares for all.

Quite clearly, Churchill’s rhetoric and his attacks on former comrades angered many voters. But the mood in the country that gave Labour its overwhelming victory was obviously determined by the recollection of the hardships of the 1920s and ’30s; Britons voted against Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. In the end Labour won 393 seats, almost double the Conservative total of 213 and far more than it had expected. On July 26, 1945, as soon as the results were clear, Churchill resigned and Attlee became prime minister.

Britain since 1945

Labour and the welfare state (1945–51)

Labour rejoiced at its political triumph, the first independent parliamentary majority in the party’s history, but it faced grave problems. The war had stripped Britain of virtually all its foreign financial resources, and the country had built up “sterling credits”—debts owed to other countries that would have to be paid in foreign currencies—amounting to several billion pounds. Moreover, the economy was in disarray. Some industries, such as aircraft manufacture, were far larger than was now needed, while others, such as railways and coal mines, were desperately short of new equipment and in bad repair. With nothing to export, Britain had no way to pay for imports or even for food. To make matters worse, within a few weeks of the surrender of Japan, on Sept. 2, 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman, as he was required to do by law, ended lend-lease, upon which Britain had depended for its necessities as well as its arms. John Maynard Keynes, as his last service to Great Britain, had to negotiate a $3.75 billion loan from the United States and a smaller one from Canada. In international terms, Britain was bankrupt.

Labour, nonetheless, set about enacting the measures that in some cases had been its program since the beginning of the century. Nationalization of railroads and coal mines, which were in any case so run down that any government would have had to bring them under state control, and of the Bank of England began immediately. In addition, road transport, docks and harbours, and the production of electrical power were nationalized. There was little debate. The Conservatives could hardly argue that any of these industries, barring electric power, was flourishing or that they could have done much differently.

More debate came over Labour’s social welfare legislation, which created the “welfare state.” Labour enacted a comprehensive program of national insurance, based upon the Beveridge Report (prepared by economist William Beveridge and advocating state action to control unemployment, along with the introduction of free health insurance and contributory social insurance) but differing from it in important ways. It regularized the de facto nationalization of public assistance, the old Poor Law, in the National Assistance Act of 1946, and in its most controversial move it established the gigantic framework of the National Health Service, which provided free comprehensive medical care for every citizen, rich or poor. The pugnacious temper of the minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, and the insistence of radical elements in the Labour Party upon the nationalization of all hospitals provoked the only serious debate accompanying the enactment of this immense legislative program, most of which went into force within two years of Labour’s accession to office. Bevan emerged at this time as an important figure on the Labour left and would remain its leader until his death in 1960.

Economic crisis and relief (1947)

Labour’s record in its first 18 months of office was distinguished. In terms of sheer legislative bulk, the government accomplished more than any other government in the 20th century save perhaps Asquith’s pre-World War I administration or the administration of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90). Yet by 1947 it had been overtaken by the economic crisis, which had not abated. The loan from the United States that was supposed to last four years was nearly gone. Imports were cut to the bone. Bread, never rationed during the war, had to be controlled. Britain had to withdraw support from Greece and Turkey, reversing a policy more than a century old, and call upon the United States to take its place. Thus, at Britain’s initiative, the Truman Doctrine came into existence.

Relief came with U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s announcement that the United States would undertake a massive program of financial aid to the European continent. Any country in the Eastern or Western bloc was entitled to take part. Although the Soviet Union immediately denounced the Marshall Plan as the beginning of a division between the East and the West, all western European countries, including Britain, hastened to participate. It can be argued that the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine represent the permanent involvement of the United States in Europe.

Withdrawal from the empire

Britain, not entirely by coincidence, was also beginning its withdrawal from the empire. Most insistent in its demand for self-government was India. The Indian independence movement had come of age during World War I and had gained momentum with the Massacre of Amritsar of 1919. The All-India Congress Party, headed by Mohandas K. Gandhi, evoked sympathy throughout the world with its policy of nonviolent resistance, forcing Baldwin’s government in the late 1920s to seek compromise. The eventual solution, embodied in the Government of India Act of 1935, provided responsible government for the Indian provinces, the Indianization of the civil service, and an Indian parliament, but it made clear that the Westminster Parliament would continue to legislate for the subcontinent. The act pleased no one, neither the Indians, the Labour Party, which considered it a weak compromise, nor a substantial section of the Conservative Party headed by Churchill, which thought it went too far. Agitation in India continued.

Further British compromise became inevitable when the Japanese in the spring of 1942 swept through Burma to the eastern borders of India while also organizing in Singapore a large Indian National Army and issuing appeals to Asian nationalism. During the war, Churchill reluctantly offered increasing installments of independence amounting to dominion status in return for all-out Indian support for the conflict. These offers were rejected by both the Muslim minority and the Hindu majority.

The election of a Labour government at the end of World War II coincided with the rise of sectarian strife within India. The new administration determined with unduly urgent haste that Britain would have to leave India. This decision was announced on June 3, 1947, and British administration in India ended 10 weeks later, on August 15. Burma (now Myanmar) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) received independence by early 1948. Britain, in effect, had no choice but to withdraw from colonial territories it no longer had the military and economic power to control.

The same circumstances that dictated the withdrawal from India required, at almost the same time, the termination of the mandate in Trans-Jordan, the evacuation of all of Egypt except the Suez Canal territory, and in 1948 the withdrawal from Palestine, which coincided with the proclamation of the State of Israel. It has been argued that the orderly and dignified ending of the British Empire, beginning in the 1940s and stretching into the 1960s, was Britain’s greatest international achievement. However, like the notion of national unity during World War II, this interpretation can also be seen largely as a myth produced by politicians and the press at the time and perpetuated since. The ending of empire was calculated upon the basis of Britain’s interests rather than those of its colonies. National interest was framed in terms of the postwar situation—that is, of an economically exhausted, dependent Britain, now increasingly caught up in the international politics of the Cold War. What later became known as ‘‘decolonization’’ was very often shortsighted, self-interested, and not infrequently bloody, as was especially the case in Malaysia (where the politics of anticommunism played a central role) and in Kenya.

Conservative government (1951–64)

The last years of Attlee’s administration were troubled by economic stringency and inflation. The pound was sharply devalued in 1949, and a general election on Feb. 23, 1950, reduced Labour’s majority over the Conservative and Liberal parties to only eight seats. Attlee himself was in poor health, and Ernest Bevin, formerly the most politically powerful man in the cabinet, had died. More-radical members of the party, led by Aneurin Bevan, were growing impatient with the increasingly moderate temper of the leadership. On Oct. 25, 1951, a second general election in a House of Commons not yet two years old returned the Conservatives under Churchill to power with a majority of 22 seats.

The Conservatives remained in power for the next 13 years, from October 1951 until October 1964, first under Churchill—who presided over the accession of the new monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, on Feb. 6, 1952, but was forced to resign on account of age and health on April 5, 1955—and then under Churchill’s longtime lieutenant and foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Eden resigned in January 1957, partly because of ill health but chiefly because of his failed attempt to roll back the retreat from empire by a reoccupation of the Suez Canal Zone after the nationalization of the canal by the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in the summer of 1956. This belated experiment in imperial adventure drew wide criticism from the United States, the British dominions, and indeed within Britain itself. Although it was cut short in December 1956, when UN emergency units supplanted British (and French) troops, the Suez intervention divided British politics as few foreign issues have done since. Eden was succeeded by his chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan. Macmillan remained in office until October 1963, when he too retired because of ill health, to be succeeded by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, then foreign secretary. In this period of single-party government, the themes were economic change and the continued retreat from colonialism.

Labour interlude (1964–70)

The long Conservative tenure came to an end on Oct. 16, 1964, with the appointment of a Labour administration headed by Harold Wilson, who had been Labour leader only a little more than a year and a half—since the death of the widely admired Hugh Gaitskell. Gaitskell and prominent Conservative R.A. Butler had been the principal figures in the politics of moderation known as ‘‘Butskellism’’ (derived by combining their last names), a slightly left-of-centre consensus predicated on the recognition of the power of trade unionism, the importance of addressing the needs of the working class, and the necessity of collaboration between social classes. Although Wilson was thought to be a Labour radical and had attracted a substantial party following on this account, he was in fact a moderate. His government inherited the problems that had accumulated during the long period of Conservative prosperity: poor labour productivity, a shaky pound, and trade union unrest. His prescription for improvement included not only a widely heralded economic development plan, to be pursued with the introduction of the most modern technology, but also stern and unpopular controls on imports, the devaluation of the pound, wage restraint, and an attempt, in the event these measures proved unsuccessful, to reduce the power of the trade unions. Eventually the Wilson government became unpopular and was kept in power primarily by weakness and division in the Conservative Party. Finally, in 1968, Wilson was confronted with an outbreak of civil rights agitation in Northern Ireland that quickly degenerated into armed violence.

The return of the Conservatives (1970–74)

The Conservatives returned in a general election on June 18, 1970, with a majority of 32. The new prime minister, Edward Heath, set three goals: to take Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC; now ultimately succeeded by the European Community, embedded in the European Union), to restore economic growth, and to break the power of the trade unions. In his short term in office he succeeded only in negotiating Britain’s entry into the EEC, in 1973. In fact, Heath was defeated by the trade unions, which simply boycotted his industrial legislation, and by the Arab oil embargo, which began in 1973 and which made a national coal miners’ strike in the winter of 1973–74 particularly effective. Heath used the strongest weapon available to a prime minister—a general election, on Feb. 28, 1974—to settle the issue of who governed Britain. The election, held when factories were in operation only three days a week and civilian Britain was periodically reduced to candlelight, was a repudiation of the policy of confrontation with labour.

Labour back in power (1974–79)

Despite losing by more than 200,000 votes to the Conservatives, Labour and Wilson returned as a minority government and promptly made peace by granting the miners’ demands. Wilson’s policies were confirmed on Oct. 10, 1974, in a second election, when his tiny majority, based upon cooperation from the Scottish National Party and the Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist Party) as well as the Liberals, was increased to an almost workable margin of 20. The Labour government faced severe economic challenges—including post-World War II record levels of unemployment and inflation—yet Wilson was able to renegotiate British membership in the EEC, which was confirmed in a referendum in April 1975. However, neither Wilson nor James Callaghan, who succeeded him on April 5, 1976, was able to come to terms with the labour unions, which were as willing to embarrass a Labour government as a Conservative one. Labour’s parliamentary position was precarious, and the party lost its governing majority through a series of by-election defeats and defections. Labour survived through what became known as the “Lib-Lab Pact,” an agreement between Callaghan and Liberal Party leader David Steel, which lasted until August 1978. Union unrest, induced by rapidly increasing prices, made the late 1970s a period of almost endless industrial conflict, culminating at the end of 1978 in the “Winter of Discontent,” a series of bitter disputes, which the government seemed unable to control and which angered the voters. Meanwhile, Labour’s slender majority in the House of Commons eroded with the defection of the Liberal and nationalist parties following the defeat of referenda in Wales and Scotland that would have created devolved assemblies. On March 28, 1979, Callaghan was forced from office after losing a vote of confidence in the House of Commons by a single vote (310–311), the first such dismissal of a prime minister since MacDonald in 1924.

Thatcherism (1979–90)

In the subsequent election, in May 1979, the Conservatives under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher were swept into power with the largest electoral swing since 1945, securing a 43-seat majority. After an extremely shaky start to her administration, Thatcher achieved popularity by sending the armed forces to expel an Argentine force from the Falkland Islands (see Falkland Islands War) in the spring of 1982, on the strength of which she won triumphant reelection in June 1983, her party capturing nearly 400 seats in the House of Commons and a 144-seat majority. The opposition Labour Party suffered its worst performance since 1918, winning only 27.6 percent of the vote—only 2.2 percent more than an alliance of the Liberals and the Social Democratic Party, a party formed by Labour defectors.

Riding this wave of success, the Thatcher government proceeded with a thoroughgoing privatization of the economy, most notably the railway system. Like the accompanying deindustrialization of what had been a manufacturing Britain, this transformation of the transportation infrastructure had immense consequences, resulting in a public transport system that was widely perceived as chaotic and inefficient, as well as in a great increase in private automobile use and in road building. Thatcher’s advocacy of what eventually became known as neoliberalism was in fact part of a similar international response to changes in the global economy driven by the United States during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (predicated on the free market and supply-side economics), with whom Thatcher formed a strong personal alliance. Deindustrialization and privatization began to change the face of Britain, one fairly immediate outcome being mass unemployment.

Partly in response to this development but also prompted by long-simmering tensions, a series of disturbances broke out in British cities in 1981, particularly in Liverpool and London, when an endemically unprivileged young black urban population turned its sense of alienation from much of British society against the police. Since the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 in London, the integration of the immigrant West Indian community into British society had been a major problem. This problem worsened with the arrival, beginning in the 1960s, of South Asian immigrants from East Africa and the Indian subcontinent, who, like the Caribbean population, were highly concentrated in particular areas of the country and of cities. Elements in the Conservative Party, led by Enoch Powell, were not averse to creating political capital out of this situation, though Powell’s English patriotism was more complex than most Conservative gut reactions. His liberal economics, along with the advocacy of the free market by Keith Joseph, was very influential on the party, especially on Thatcher. Despite promises to alleviate the urban poverty of immigrant communities, little was done in the 1980s, and in the 1990s the exclusion of blacks and to a lesser extent South Asians from an equal share in the benefits of British society continued to be a critical problem, one which politicians confronted reluctantly and to limited effect.

This was evident earlier in the very limited nature of the Race Relations Act of 1965, itself fiercely opposed by the Conservatives. A subsequent amendment, in 1968, outlawed discrimination in areas such as employment and the provision of goods and services. However, it was not until the Race Relations Act of 1976 that any real change was evident. This act made both direct and indirect discrimination an offense and provided legal redress for those discriminated against through employment tribunals and the courts. Yet another amendment to the act, in 2001, included public bodies, particularly local authorities and the police, whose role in black communities continued to be a considerable source of tension. This unease was compounded by endemic inequality and deprivation in ethnic (especially Asian) communities. In 2001 the result was a wave of public disturbances across the north of England, in which disaffected youth once again played a leading role. In Britain, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the United States, the advent of the so-called ‘‘war on terror’’ served to deepen existing divisions by giving ‘‘racial’’ tensions a new form, that of ‘‘Islamophobia.’’

A considerable degree of reluctance also characterized the other great problem of the Thatcher administrations, namely the conflict in Northern Ireland. Since 1945 successive British governments failed to address discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. The international civil rights current of the late 1960s triggered a new and intensive wave of protest in Northern Ireland, which was met by a continuing reluctance to reform and by police overreaction. Into this increasingly explosive situation stepped the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), which had separated from the long-established ‘‘Official’’ IRA in 1969 and which gained support after 13 Roman Catholic civil rights demonstrators were killed by British troops in Londonderry on Jan. 30, 1972, an event that became known as Bloody Sunday. The IRA mounted an increasingly violent campaign against the British Army in Ulster, taking their activity to the British mainland with increasing effect in the 1970s. The so-called ‘‘Troubles’’ ensued for the better part of three decades, with the British Army and the IRA fighting to a vicious draw in the end. The Troubles also took the form of sectarian strife in Northern Ireland, polarizing the Protestant and Catholic communities, each of which had its own paramilitary organizations. The IRA “hunger strikers” of the early 1980s failed to move Thatcher, a resistance that probably ultimately harmed her by producing great sympathy for the republican cause in Northern Ireland. Nor did she appear to be moved by the bombing at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1984, an attempt on her own life that resulted in the deaths of several of her friends and colleagues within the party. Nonetheless, even at this parlous time, unofficial and secret contacts were being established with the IRA. These led to the very long and tortuous process of negotiation that eventually became known as the ‘‘peace process.’’

Despite being unable to resolve the Irish problem, Thatcher succeeded in 1987 in winning an unprecedented third general election, and in January 1988 she surpassed Asquith as the longest continually serving prime minister since Lord Liverpool (1812–27). Thatcher’s electoral success came from her extraordinary capacity for leadership and the development of ‘‘Thatcherism.” Responding to widespread disillusionment with Labour government and the state, Thatcher was able to tap into, and give leadership to, a politics of freedom and choice that expressed the desires of many people in the 1980s. In the wake of the debacle that the 1970s had been for the political left and trade union movement, Thatcherism’s variant of contemporary free-market neoliberalism gained increasing momentum. It effectively ended the postwar accommodation sometimes referred to as the corporate state, through which government, the unions, and business enabled a form of state-managed capitalism to develop. In its movement away from that accord, Britain foreshadowed developments in central and eastern Europe after the demise of communism there in 1989.

Thatcher’s premiership, however, did not survive her third term. She alienated even fellow Conservatives with her insistence on replacing local property taxes with a uniform poll tax and with her unwillingness to fully integrate the pound into a common European currency. By the end of 1989, voter discontent was manifest in by-elections, and in November 1990 Thatcher faced serious opposition for the first time in the Conservative party’s annual vote for selection of a leader. When she did not receive the required majority, she withdrew, and John Major, the chancellor of the Exchequer since October 1989, was chosen on November 27. Thatcher resigned as prime minister the following day and was replaced by Major.

John Major (1990–97)

Despite having presided over the country’s longest recession since the 1930s and owing partly to the Labour Party’s overconfidence, the Conservatives won their fourth consecutive election in April 1992, albeit with a diminished majority of 21 in Parliament. That they did so was largely a result of the ongoing conflict within Labour as it continued to undergo ‘‘modernization.’’ As the recession lingered, the popularity of Major—and of the Conservatives—plummeted, and the party fared poorly in by-elections and in local elections. Major’s economic policies were questioned after the ‘‘Black Wednesday’’ fiasco of Sept. 16, 1992, when he was forced to withdraw Britain from the European exchange-rate mechanism and devalue the pound. Despite having pledged not to increase taxes during the 1992 campaign, Major supported a series of increases to restore Britain’s financial equilibrium. When he sought to secure passage of the Treaty on European Union in 1993, his grip on power was challenged. Twenty-three Conservatives voted against a government resolution on the treaty, causing the government’s defeat and compelling Major to call a vote of confidence to pass the treaty. Tory troubles mounted with scandals in local governments, particularly in Westminster in 1994, and thereafter Major was seemingly unable to shake off the growing reputation of his government not only for economic mismanagement but also for corruption and moral hypocrisy. A seemingly unending series of financial and sexual scandals took their toll, and paper offensives like Major’s “Citizens Charter,” attempting to stop the growing rot of concern about the efficiency and responsibility of privatized industry by laying down citizens’ rights, made little impact.

As criticism of his leadership mounted within the Conservative Party, Major resigned as party leader in June 1995. In the ensuing leadership election, Major solidified his position—though 89 Conservative members of Parliament voted for his opponent and 22 others abstained or spoiled their ballots. Major’s government was also severely criticized for its handling of the crisis involving ‘‘mad cow disease,’’ in which it was discovered that large numbers of cattle in the human food supply in Britain were infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Facing a rejuvenated Labour Party under the leadership of Tony Blair, the Conservatives suffered a crushing defeat in the general election of 1997, winning only 165 seats, their fewest since 1906. Labour’s 419 seats and its 179-seat majority were its largest in British history.

New Labour and after (since 1997)

During its years out of power, the Labour Party had undergone a gradual transformation as it attempted to distance itself from the power of the unions on the one hand and the power of the membership on the other, in the guise of the traditional role of the Labour Party Conference. This process had been started before 1992 by Neil Kinnock, who led the party from 1983 to 1992, and it was continued by his successors, first John Smith and then Blair. The need for fundamental reappraisal had been urged as early as 1981, with the founding of the Social Democratic Party, when prominent Labour Party politicians, led by Roy Jenkins, seceded from the party in an attempt to “break the mould” of British politics. Divisions not only between the right and left in the party but also within the left of the party itself added to the chaos that was the British left in the 1980s; the insistence of the radical leftist and former Labour minister Tony Benn on running against the former Labour chancellor Denis Healey in the party election for deputy leadership in 1981 effectively split the radical democratic left and disabled the possibility of an early riposte to Thatcher. It also, ironically enough, contributed to what became known as ‘‘New Labour,’’ rather than a more left-wing variant of labourism eventually replacing the Conservatives.

The understanding that the party would have to rethink the market (not only in economic but in social terms), embracing it in a way foreign to many of the unions and the traditional Labour left, grew increasingly after 1992, until, after the Labour victory of 1997, there was a clearly marked path for New Labour. The most symbolically important marker of the change from Old to New Labour was the repeal of the party’s Clause IV, engineered by Blair in 1995. The replacement of old Clause IV, which had committed the party to the ‘‘common ownership of the means of production,’’ ended almost 80 years of dedication to that goal. The new path of the party was to be a middle one, in the phraseology of New Labour, a “third way,’’ supposedly embracing both social justice and the market. Not only in rhetoric but in reality, “new” Labour was to be different from “old.” There was also to be increasing attention to the importance of the media, an attention that the Tories had developed into something of a fine art under Thatcher, with her press secretary Bernard Ingham. Given the increasing role of the media in the presentation of politics and indeed the almost wholesale integration of political substance and political style through the media, this mastery of the art of “spin” was to become a political necessity. Therefore, art for art’s sake (spin for spin’s sake) was to become a feature of Labour government after 1997. This approach was ultimately to rebound upon the party and, indeed, upon the political process in general during the next decade with the emergence of widespread disillusionment with politics in British society, especially among young people.

Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, which undoubtedly benefited from the inspirational leadership Blair seemed to offer, nevertheless may have been less the result of an unbounded belief in New Labour than of the discrediting of the Conservative Party. It is certain that Blair was helped into power by the parlous state into which the Conservative Party had fallen under Major after 1992. Promising that “we ran for office as New Labour, and we shall govern as New Labour,’’ the Blair government in fact began in a rather conservative fashion, by accepting existing government spending limitations. Nonetheless, the difficult and what came to be the increasingly troubled task of combining aspects of Thatcherism with the idea of a ‘‘social market” gathered momentum. Certainly, through much of Blair’s tenure a buoyant economy, well managed by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, did a great deal to ease the passage of New Labour and the third way. In his first major initiative and one of his boldest moves, Blair, abetted by Brown, granted the Bank of England the power to determine interest-rate policy without government consultation. This was a major move in the disengagement of financial markets from the state.

Blair’s government was also more and more taken up with the question of whether Britain should stay in or remain outside the European monetary union. At stake were fundamental ideas about British sovereignty and whether, in a progressively globalized world in which some claimed that the individual nation-state was becoming unviable, sovereignty in its existing forms could remain intact. For the Conservative Party, ever more hostile to the European Union, this question was central to its attempts to fight back against the Labour Party. Blair’s government did sign the Treaty on European Union’s Social Chapter—which sought to harmonize European social policies on issues such as working conditions, equality in the workplace, and worker health and safety—despite Major’s earlier negotiation of an ‘‘opt out’’ mechanism to placate the treaty’s Conservative opponents. However, the Labour Party’s implementation of the Social Chapter was at best halfhearted, and its goal became to influence as much as possible the European Union itself to moderate the operations of the chapter. As with financial deregulation, the emphasis in labour affairs was on the market.

Conspicuous progress was also made in solving the problem of Northern Ireland. Under Major, in 1994, the IRA declared a cease-fire, the Protestant paramilitaries followed suit soon after, and talks between the British government, the Irish government, and Sinn Féin began. The IRA cease-fire secured a long and involved series of negotiations, in which the Belfast Agreement of 1998 (also known as the Good Friday Agreement) seemed to have at last brought peace to Northern Ireland. Unionist suspicion and concern about fundamental reforms to the traditional power structure of the province meant, however, that the implementation of the agreement became a tortuous business. Indeed, it took almost another decade to arrive at what looked like a final resolution, when in 2007 the Northern Ireland Assembly was restored on the basis of power sharing between what had erstwhile been bitter enemies, Sinn Féin and the Ian Paisley-led Democratic Unionist Party.

In May 1998 voters in London overwhelmingly approved the government’s plan for a new assembly for the city and for its first directly elected mayor, resulting in the capital’s first citywide government since the abolition of the Greater London Council by Thatcher in 1986. However, the precedent of an elected mayor in London was not subsequently followed by similar action in other major British cities. In the late 1990s the Labour government also carried out several other constitutional reforms. The House of Lords, previously dominated by hereditary peers (nobles), was reconstituted as an assembly composed primarily of appointive life peers, with only limited representation of hereditary peers. Nonetheless, the striking contradiction of an unelected legislative assembly in a country that prided itself on its traditions of liberal democracy was apparent. Following referenda in Wales and Scotland, the National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Parliament were established in 1999 and granted powers previously reserved for the central government. Yet, with the exception of political devolution to the component states of the United Kingdom, the Labour Party remained reluctant to reform the constitution, so that at the beginning of the 21st century it was still the revered mysteries of the uncodified British constitution by which the British were governed.

The 1990s were a period of transition and controversy for the monarchy. In 1992, during what Queen Elizabeth II referred to as the royal family’s annus horribilis, Charles, prince of Wales, heir to the British throne, and his wife, Diana, princess of Wales, separated, as did Elizabeth’s son Andrew, duke of York, and his wife, Sarah, duchess of York. Moreover, Elizabeth’s daughter, Anne, divorced, and a fire gutted the royal residence of Windsor Castle. After details of extramarital affairs by Charles and Diana surfaced and the couple divorced, observers openly questioned Charles’s fitness to succeed his mother as sovereign, and public support for the monarchy ebbed. The immensely popular Diana (dubbed the ‘‘People’s Princess’’) died in an automobile accident in Paris in 1997, prompting an outpouring of grief, or at least hysteria, throughout the world. The British royal family came under scrutiny for its handling of the matter—especially the queen’s reluctance, because of tradition, to allow the national flag to fly at half-staff over Buckingham Palace. With the queen celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary, the queen mother, Elizabeth, celebrating her 100th birthday, and Charles working hard to improve his public image, the fortunes of the monarchy improved by the end of the 1990s. Nevertheless, the established institutions of the British state had been called into question in an unprecedented way. If the popularity of the monarchy survived, it was largely the result of the queen’s persona; the royal family as a whole—itself the idealized media creation of late Victorian times—frequently had become the object of ridicule. The transformation of the monarchy was indeed emblematic of the very unevenly progressing severance of the British from the long-lived institutions and culture of the 19th century. To celebrate the new millennium, the monumental Millennium Dome, the largest structure of its kind in the world, and the Millennium Bridge were opened in London. It was perhaps symbolic of the contradictions of this modernity that the dome was dogged by controversy regarding its cost and design and the bridge by the fiasco of its opening, when it was found to move alarmingly above the waters of the Thames when in public use.

In June 2001 Blair’s government was reelected with a 167-seat majority in the House of Commons—the largest majority ever won by a second-term British government. With the question of European integration continuing to be of great significance in British politics, the new Labour administration chose not to adopt the common European currency, the euro, partly because of a fear of popular response. However, it was on the Conservative side that Britain’s relationship with Europe was most urgently a party issue. It continued to divide a party riven by differences, a party that looked more and more like the Labour Party of the 1980s and early ’90s. Indeed, there is a direct parallel between the recent histories of the two parties: the traditional left of the Labour Party corresponded to the traditional right of the Conservative Party, as both fought hard to stem the tide of party modernization. The battle for the soul of the Conservative Party was joined with growing fervour with the election of David Cameron in December 2005 as its modernizing leader. His subsequent attempt to steer the party back to the political centre, and away from the old order of the Thatcherite legacy, was every bit as difficult as the redirection undertaken by Labour modernizers. In addition to Europe and economic policy, the issue of increased levels of immigration into Britain after 2000 further divided the Conservatives.

Indeed, Britain as a whole became divided on this issue. Large bodies of opinion, stirred up by xenophobia in the popular press, responded with fear and anxiety to increased levels of immigration from central and eastern Europe that were a consequence of European integration. In a more globalized and war-ridden world, the burgeoning flow of asylum seekers into Britain added to this climate, as did the ‘‘war on terror.’’ Asian Muslims, many of them long-standing British citizens and British-born, were nonetheless frequently lumped with immigrants and asylum seekers as part of an undifferentiated external threat to Britishness.

Following the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, global terrorism dominated the political agenda in Britain, and Blair closely allied himself with the administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush. Britain contributed troops to the military effort to oust Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which was charged with harbouring Osama bin Laden, who had founded al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization linked to the September 11 attacks. Although Blair received strong support for his antiterrorist strategy from the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons, a small minority of Labour members of Parliament opposed military action. The Blair government also faced a slowing economy and a widespread perception that public services such as health, education, and transportation had not improved. Although large amounts of public money had been spent, particularly on the health service, much of this went into elaborating the new and highly evolved structures of management that came to characterize Labour administration of the state. However, it was the subject of the Iraq War, and Britain’s support for the U.S. position on it, that did most to undermine the standing of Blair.

From late 2002, politics in Britain was dominated by Blair’s decision to support military action to oust from power the Iraqi government of ṢaddāmḤussein, which was alleged to either possess or be developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that might either be used against Iraq’s neighbours or find their way into the hands of international terrorists. Notwithstanding widespread and enormous public protests against war, the resignation of several government ministers, and the support of some one-third of the parliamentary Labour Party for a motion opposing the government’s policy, Blair remained steadfast in his conviction that Ṣaddām was an imminent threat that had to be removed. Following Ṣaddām’s ouster, however, British and American intelligence was found to have been faulty. When no WMD were found, critics of the government charged that it had distorted (‘‘sexed up’’) intelligence to solidify its claims against the Iraqis. Nevertheless, in May 2005 Blair won another term as prime minister—albeit with a significantly reduced parliamentary majority—as Labour won its third consecutive general election for the first time in the party’s history. The fallout from the Iraq War—initially the controversy over the decision to go to war in the first place and then the protracted involvement in a conflict that began to look more and more like a civil war—sapped public and political support for Blair. But, ever the consummate politician, he held on for two years after his reelection despite the friction between himself and his appointed successor, Gordon Brown, who became the new prime minister in June 2007.

Brown’s hold on power was threatened in Spring 2009. With the British economy already shaken by the spreading worldwide recession engendered by the financial crisis of late 2008, a scandal broke involving many dozens of members of Parliament who had extravagantly abused their government expense accounts, including members of Brown’s cabinet. The scandal and the troubled economy contributed to anemic performances by the Labour Party in local elections in Britain and in those for the European Parliament. Brown responded with a thorough reshuffle of his cabinet and withstood a challenge to his leadership from within the party in early June by promising to change his leadership style.

Society, state, and economy

State and society

Despite the so-called “dismantling of controls” after the end of World War I, government involvement in economic life was to continue, as were increased public expenditure, extensions of social welfare, and a higher degree of administrative rationalization. In the interwar years the level of integration of labour, capital, and the state was more considerable than is often thought. Attempts to organize the market continued up to the beginning of World War II, evident, for example, in government’s financial support for regional development in the late 1930s. Few Britons, however, felt they were living in a period of decreased government power. Nonetheless, attachment to the “impartial state” and to voluntarism was still considerable and exemplified by the popularity of the approved organizations set up to administer health insurance in the interwar years. The governance of society through what were now taken to be the social characteristics of that society itself, for example, family life as well as demographic and economic factors—developed by Liberal administrations before World War I—along with the advent of “planning,” continued to be the direction of change, but the connection back to Victorian notions of moral individualism and the purely regulative, liberal state was still strong. Even the greatest exponent of the move toward economic intervention and social government, John Maynard Keynes, whose General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935–36) provided the major rationale for subsequent state intervention and whose work downgraded the importance of private rationality and private responsibility, nonetheless believed that governmental intervention in one area was necessary to buttress freedom and privacy elsewhere, so that the moral responsibility of the citizen would be forthcoming.

There was, however, only an incremental increase in the level of interest in state involvement in the economy and society in the immediate years before World War II, when the fear of war galvanized politicians and administrators. It was the “total war” of 1939–45 that brought a degree of centralized control of the economy and society that was unparalleled before or indeed since. In some ways this was an expression of prewar developments, but the impetus of the war was enormous and felt in all political quarters. In 1941 it was a Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, who introduced the first Keynesian budget. Cross-party support was also evident in the response to the 1942 Beveridge Report, which became the blueprint of what was later to be called the welfare state. After 1945 a decisive shift had taken place toward the recognition of state intervention and planning as the norm, not the exception, and toward the idea that society could now be molded by political will. Nonetheless, there was much popular dislike of “government controls,” and the familiar rhetoric of the impartial state remained strong, as reflected in Beveridge’s attack in 1948 on the Labour government’s failure to encourage voluntarism. This voluntarism, however, was decidedly different from 19th-century voluntarism in that Beveridge advocated a minister-guardian of voluntary action. So pervasive was the postwar party consensus on the welfare state that the term coined to identify it, “Butskellism,” is at least as well remembered as the successive chancellors of the Exchequer—R.A. Butler and Hugh Gaitskell—from whose amalgamated surnames it was derived.

From the 1960s onward this consensus began to unravel, with the perception of poor economic performance and calls for the modernization of British society and the British economy. The mixed economy came under pressure, as did the institutions of the welfare state, especially the National Health Service (NHS). In the 1970s in particular, older beliefs in constitutional methods came into question—for instance, in the first national Civil Service strike ever, in 1973, and in the strikes and political violence that marked that decade as a whole. The result was a revolution in the relationship between state and society, whereby the market came to replace society as the model of state governance. This did not, however, mean a return to 19th-century models, though the character of this manifestation of the relationship between state and society was clearly liberal, in line with the long British tradition of governance.

Institutionally, this way of governing was pluralistic, but its pluralism was decidedly statist. It was not, as in the 19th century, a private, self-governing voluntarist pluralism but one that was designedly competitive, enlisting quasi-governmental institutions as clients competing with one another in a marketplace. In economic and cultural conditions increasingly shaped by globalization, the economy was exposed to the benign operations of the market not by leaving it alone but by actively intervening in it to create the conditions for entrepreneurship.

Analogously, social life was marketized too, thrown open to the idea that the capacity for self-realization could be obtained only through individual activity, not through society. Institutions like the NHS were reformed as a series of internal markets. These markets were to be governed by what has been called “the new public management.” This involved a focus upon accountability, with explicit standards and measures of performance. The ethical change involved a transition from the idea of public service to one of private management of the self. Parallel to this “culture of accountability” was the emergence of an “audit society,” in which formal and professionally sanctioned monitoring systems replaced the trust that earlier versions of relationship between state and society had invested in professional specialists of all sorts (the professions themselves, such as university teaching, were opened up to this sort of audit, which was all the more onerous because, if directed from above, it was carried out by the professionals themselves, so preserving the fiction of professional freedom).

The social state gave way to a state that was regarded as “enabling,” permitting not only the citizen but also the firm, the locality, and so on to freely choose. This politics of choice was in fact shared by the Thatcher’s Conservative administration and Blair’s Labour one. In both the state was seen as a partner. In the so-called “Third Way” of Blair, one between socialism and the market, the partnership evolved much more in terms of community than in the Conservative case. In Blair’s Labour vision there was a more active concern with creating ethical citizens who would exchange obligations for rights in a new realization of marketized communities. This new relation of state and society involved the decentralization of rule upon the citizen himself and herself, which was reflected in the host of self-help activities to be found in the Britain of the 1990s and 2000s, from the new concern with alternative health therapies to the self-management of schools. Reflecting this decentralization (in which the state itself made the citizen a consumer, for instance, of education and health) was the increasingly important role of the consumption of goods in constructing lifestyles through which individual choice could realize self-expression and self-fulfilment.

Economy and society

Economically, Britain had been hurt severely by World War I. The huge balances of credit in foreign currencies that had provided the capital for the City of London’s financial operations for a century were spent. Britain had moved from the position of a creditor to that of a debtor country. Moreover, its industrial infrastructure, already out of date at the start of the war, had been allowed to depreciate and decay further. The industries of the Industrial Revolution, such as coal mining, textile production, and shipbuilding, upon which British prosperity had been built, were now either weakened or redundant. The Japanese had usurped the textile export market. Coal was superseded by other forms of energy. Shipping lost during the war had to be almost fully replaced with more-modern and more-efficient vessels.

Finally, the Treaty of Versailles, particularly its harsh demands on Germany for financial reparations, ensured that foreign markets would remain depressed. Germany had been Britain’s largest foreign customer. The export of German coal to France, as stipulated by the treaty, upset world coal markets for nearly a decade. Depression and unemployment, not prosperity and a better Britain, characterized the interwar years.

The British economy, as well as that of the rest of the world, was devastated by the Great Depression. The post-World War I world of reconstruction became a prewar world of deep depression, radicalism, racism, and violence. Although MacDonald was well-meaning and highly intelligent, he was badly equipped to handle the science of economics and the depression. By the end of 1930, unemployment was nearly double the figure of 1928 and would reach 25 percent of the workforce by the spring of 1931. It was accompanied, after the closing of banks in Germany in May, by a devastating run on gold in British banks that threatened the stability of the pound.

MacDonald’s government fell in August over the protection of the pound; Britain needed to borrow gold, but foreign bankers would lend gold only on the condition that domestic expenditures would be cut, and this meant, among other things, reducing unemployment insurance payments. However, a Labour Party whose central commitment was to the welfare of the working people could not mandate such a course of action even in an economic crisis. Thus, the Labour cabinet resigned. MacDonald with a few colleagues formed a coalition with the Conservative and Liberal opposition on Aug. 24, 1931. This new “national” government, which allowed Britain to go off the gold standard on September 21, was confirmed in office by a general election on October 27, in which 473 Conservatives were returned while the Labour Party in the House of Commons was nearly destroyed, capturing only 52 seats. MacDonald, who was returned to the House of Commons along with 13 so-called National Labour colleagues, remained prime minister nonetheless. The new government was in fact a conservative government, and MacDonald, by consenting to remain prime minister, became and remains in Labour histories a traitor.

Under Neville Chamberlain, who became chancellor of the Exchequer in November 1931, the coalition government pursued a policy of strict economy. Housing subsidies were cut; Britain ended its three-quarter-century devotion to free trade and began import protection; and interest rates were lowered. Manufacturing revived, stimulated particularly by a marked revival in the construction of private housing made possible by reduced interest rates and by a modest growth in exports as a result of the cheaper pound. Similarly, unemployment declined, although it never reached the 10 percent level of the late 1920s until after the outbreak of war.

In terms of the occupational structure of Britain, the aftermath of World War I saw the decline of the great 19th-century staple industries become increasingly sharp, and the interwar experience of textiles was particularly difficult. The great expansion of mining after 1881 became a contraction, particularly from the 1930s, and domestic service, which itself may be termed a staple industry, suffered similarly. In 1911 these sectors accounted for some 20 percent of the British labour force, but by 1961 they accounted for barely 5 percent. Manufacturing continued to be of great importance into the third quarter of the century, when the next great restructuring occurred. After World War I an increasing emphasis on monopoly, scale, and sophisticated labour-management became apparent in British industry, though there was still much of the old “archaicism” of the 19th century to be seen, both in respect to management practices and the entrenched power of certain skilled occupations. Although different from its 19th-century antecedents, a distinct sense of working-class identity, based on manual work—especially in the manufacturing industry and mining—remained strong until about 1960. This was buttressed by a considerable degree of continuity in terms of residential community. After 1960 or so, the wholesale development of slum clearance and relocation to new residential settings was to go far to dissolve this older sense of identity.

From the interwar years automobile manufacture, the manufacture of consumer durables, and light industry, especially along the corridor between London and Birmingham, as well as in the new industrial suburbs of London, announced the economic eclipse of the north by the south, the “south” here including South Wales and industrial Scotland. In the Midlands electrical manufacturing and automobile industries developed. In the south, in addition to construction industries, new service industries such as hotels and the shops of London flourished. These in particular offered employment opportunities for women at a time when the demand for domestic servants was in decline. London grew enormously, and the unemployment rate there was half that of the north of England and of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The effect of these developments was to divide Britain politically and economically into two areas, a division that, with the exception of an interval during World War II and its immediate aftermath, still exists. New, science-based industries (e.g., the electrical and chemical industries) also developed from the interwar period, which together with the multiplication of service industries and the growth of the public sector—despite repeated government attempts to halt this growth—had by 1960 given rise to an occupational structure very different from that of the 19th century.

On the surface the 1950s and early ’60s were years of economic expansion and prosperity. The economic well-being of the average Briton rose dramatically and visibly. But when prosperity created a demand for imports, large-scale buying abroad hurt the value of the pound. A declining pound meant higher interest rates as well as credit and import controls, which in turn caused inflation. Inflation hurt exports and caused strikes. These crises occurred in approximately three-year cycles.

The economic concern then of the British government in the 1950s and ’60s and indeed through the 1970s was to increase productivity and ensure labour peace so that Britain could again become an exporting country able to pay for public expenditure at home while maintaining the value of its currency and its place as a world banker. A drastic run on the pound had been one of the pressing reasons for the quick withdrawal from Suez in 1956, and throughout the 1950s and ’60s Britain’s share of world trade fell with almost perfect consistency by about 1 percent per year. On the other hand, Britain benefited from an unprecedented rise in tourism occasioned mostly by the attraction of “Swinging London.”

All of this made Britain’s decision, after fierce political discussion, not to join the planned EEC, established by the Treaty of Rome on March 25, 1957, an event of signal importance. It meant that although economic conditions in Britain did indeed improve in the last years of the 1950s and through 1960—Prime Minister Harold Macmillan could remark with only slight irony that the British people had never “had it so good”—Britain nevertheless did not share in the astonishing growth in European production and trade led by the “economic miracle” in West Germany. By the mid-1960s there were signs that British prosperity was declining. Increases in productivity were disappearing, and labour unrest was marked. Prime Minister Macmillan quickly realized that it had been a mistake not to join the EEC, and in July 1961 he initiated negotiations to do so. By this time, however, the French government was headed by Charles de Gaulle, and he chose to veto Britain’s entry. Britain did not join the EEC until 1973.

In the aftermath of increasing difficulties for industry and increasing labour conflict, the Thatcher governments after 1979 set about a far-reaching restructuring of the economy, one based less on economic than on political and moral factors. Thatcher set out to end socialism in Britain. Her most dramatic acts consisted of a continuing series of statutes to denationalize nearly every industry that Labour had brought under government control in the previous 40 years as well as some industries, such as telecommunications, that had been in state hands for a century or more. But perhaps her most important achievement, helped by high unemployment in the old heavy industries, was in winning the contest for power with the trade unions. Instead of attempting to put all legislation in one massive bill, as Heath had done, Thatcher proceeded step by step, making secondary strikes and boycotts illegal, providing for fines, as well as allocation of union funds, for the violation of law, and taking measures for ending the closed shop. Finally, in 1984–85, she won a struggle with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), who staged a nationwide strike to prevent the closure of 20 coal mines that the government claimed were unproductive. The walkout, which lasted nearly a year and was accompanied by continuing violence, soon became emblematic of the struggle for power between the Conservative government and the trade unions. After the defeat of the miners, that struggle was essentially over; Thatcher’s victory was aided by divisions within the ranks of the miners themselves, exacerbated by the divisive leadership of the militant NUM leader Arthur Scargill, and by the Conservative government’s use of the police as a national constabulary, one not afraid to employ violence. The miners returned to work without a single concession. In all these efforts, Thatcher was helped by a revival of world prosperity and lessening inflation, by the profits from industries sold to investors, and by the enormous sums realized from the sale abroad of North Sea oil. From 1974 the unexpected windfall of the discovery of large oil reserves under the North Sea, together with the increase in oil prices that year, transformed Britain into a considerable player in the field of oil production (production soared from 87,000 tons in 1974 to 75,000,000 tons five years later). The political use of oil revenues was seen by some as characteristic of the failure of successive British governments to put them to good economic and social use.

The restructuring of the economy away from the manual and industrial sectors, which was a consequence of the rapid decline of manufacturing industry in Britain in the 1990s, also meant the decline of the old, manual working class and the coming of what has been called “postindustrial” or “postmodern” society. Within industry itself, “post-Fordist” (flexible, technologically innovative, and demand-driven) production and new forms of industrial management restructured the labour force in ways that broke up traditional hierarchies and outlooks. Not least among these changes has been the expansion of work, chiefly part-time, for women. There has been a corresponding rise of new, nonmanual employment, primarily in the service sector. In the early phases of these changes, there was much underemployment and unemployment.

The result has been not only the numerical decline of the old working class but the diminishing significance of manual work itself, as well as the growing disappearance of work as a fairly stable, uniform, lifelong experience. The shift in employment and investment from production to consumption industries has paralleled the rise of consumption itself as an arena in which people’s desires and hopes are centred and as the basis of their conceptions of themselves and the social order. However, in the 1990s there was a considerable move back to the workplace as the source of identity and self-value. At the same time, new management practices and ideas developed that were in line with the still generally high level of working hours.

Central to the new economy and new ideas about work has been the staggering growth of information technology. This has been especially evident in the operations of financial markets, contributing hugely to their global integration. One of the great beneficiaries of these changes has been the City of London, which has profited from very light state regulation. The financial sector, in terms of international markets and the domestic provision of financial goods and services, has become a major sector of the new economy. Speculation in markets, with ever-increasing degrees of ingenuity (for example, the phenomenon of hedge fund trading), has helped create a cohort of the newly rich in Britain and elsewhere. It has also led to an increasingly unstable world financial system. The spoils of this new society have been divided between large-scale multinational corporations and new kinds of industrial organizations that are smaller and often more responsive to demand, evident in development of the dot.com and e-commerce phenomena. Internet shopping, along with the unparalleled development of giant supermarket chains, transformed the traditional pattern of retailing and shopping and, with it, patterns of social interaction. This, however, was only one aspect of a general transformation of the economy and society that even as recently as the early 1990s had hardly been glimpsed.

In the conditions of economic stability and prosperity at the turn of the 21st century, a relatively large middle group arose in terms of income, housing, and lifestyle that politicians and others began to refer to as ‘‘middle England.’’ In effect this meant Scotland and Wales as well, although in Britain as a whole the old imbalance between west and east continued, in a similar fashion to that between north and south in England. However, even this middle was exposed to the vagaries of financial markets and an underperforming welfare state. Moreover, the gap between the least well-off and the most well-off widened even further, so that alongside the new rich were the new poor, or underclass. Social mobility either declined or stalled in comparison with the 1960s—in particular, the capacity of the poorest parents to send their children to university. Levels of poverty among children continued to be high. The reborn postindustrial cities of the north and Midlands, such as Manchester, came to symbolize much of the new Britain, with their mixture of revitalized city centres and deprived city perimeters that were home to the new poor. However, as had long been the case, the economic centre of the country remained in London and the southeast. Britain thus became a prosperous but increasingly unequal and divided society.

Family and gender

After World War I there was a further decline in the birth rate and a continuing spread of contraception, though contraceptive methods had been known and practiced by all sections of society for a considerable time before this. What was important in the interwar years was a development of contraceptive practices within marriage. The gradual spread and acceptance of “family planning” was also important; however, this acceptance was not usually seen in terms of women’s rights. The birth rate continued to fall through the interwar years, and in the 1920s the two-child pattern of marriage was becoming established. With it came the “nuclear family” structure that was to be characteristic of much of the 20th century, with households predominantly made up of two parents with children who on achieving adulthood will leave the home to establish similar families themselves. Nonetheless, as always, there was considerable variation in practice. Coresident kin and lodgers were still found, particularly in working-class households, where overcrowding was often marked, as it was in London after the disruptions of World War II. There was also a concentration on childbirth within the early years of marriage, as well as longer life expectancy for children themselves.

Marriage was thus becoming a different kind of institution, at once more intimate and private, as well as an arena in which individual self-expression was becoming more possible than previously. In many respects, the privacy that was possible for the better-off in society in the mid- and late 19th century became increasingly possible for those less well-off in the course of the 20th century. However, the privacy that new kinds of family life and new economic possibilities made possible for poorer people differed from middle-class privacy. It was concerned with securing order and control of people’s lives in economic conditions that were still often difficult. As a result, “working-class respectability” differed from the respectability evident further up the social scale. For instance, privacy was evident in the slowly increasing possibility of separate rooms for separate functions (kitchens, sculleries, and bathrooms, for example) and the development of more-private sleeping arrangements. However, the respectability of this private life was also public in that it was on show to neighbours as a living proof of the family’s capacity to create order in difficult lives: the elaborately presented front of the house and the purposefully opened curtains of the “best room” of the home displayed the carefully presented if precarious affluence of the family.

Nonetheless, despite material and cultural class differences, there was a convergence across the social spectrum upon an increasingly common privatized and nucleated family life. This was part of a much more homogeneous life course and set of life experiences, which made the population increasingly uniform, at least compared with that of the 19th century. Age at marriage, the experience of marriage itself and of running one’s own household, household size, and the similarity of the age at which major life-cycle transitions occurred all tended to produce more cultural uniformity than previously; this increasing uniformity was of vast importance for the new consumer and media industries, not to mention the political parties. The political culture was in fact transformed from one based on class to a new sort of populist, demotic politics, shaped at least as much by the mass media, especially the popular press, as by the politicians.

The greater individualism possible within this more-privatized form of marriage received expression in the growing incidence of divorce, even as marriage itself grew greatly in importance in the 20th century. By the 1970s almost every adult female married at least once, though this figure fell considerably beginning in the 1980s. By 1997 one-third of births occurred to parents not formally married; however, more than half of these were to parents residing at the same address. The phenomena of one-parent families, as well as of stable unmarried cohabitation, now became widely apparent. If people married more often, they divorced more frequently too, so that by the 1980s marriage disruption rates by divorce were equal to those caused by death in the 19th century. By this time approximately one out of three marriages ended in divorce. These changes were of profound significance for politics in that, in the public and the political mind, they became linked to the phenomena of antisocial behaviour by youth. Although this link was in reality complex, it did not stop the Blair administration from pursuing a ‘‘respect’’ agenda, which was designed to restore an at least partly imagined former era of civic virtue and public order. The ill-fated ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order), restricting the movement of offenders, was celebrated by some as an appropriately strong response to troublemaking neighbours and gangs but was condemned by others as an attack on civil liberties.

Of course, these social changes also greatly affected the understanding of women’s role in society. They were complemented by the growth of women’s employment, particularly in part-time jobs and most notably in the service sector, so that after 1945 a different life cycle for women evolved that included the return to work after childbirth. These changes did not result in the equality of earnings, however; for example, despite the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, under which the Equal Opportunities Commission was established, women’s pay rates in the 1980s were only about two-thirds of those of men. Still, higher education was increasingly opened to women from the 1960s, so that by 1980 they formed 40 percent of admissions to universities, although, as with male students, they were overwhelmingly from the higher social classes. As part of the widespread movement toward greater liberalization in the 1960s, in part inspired by developments in the United States, women’s liberation also developed in Britain.

In turn, that movement gave rise to a whole range of feminisms, some more radical than others but all aiming at the ingrained assumptions of male superiority in employment practices, in education, and in the understanding of family life itself. Intellectual life became increasingly characterized by an explicitly feminist analysis, which led to some fundamental rethinking in a whole range of academic disciplines, though resistance to this was strong. Changes in patterns of employment challenged stereotyped distinctions between the breadwinner and the housewife, as well as stereotypical notions of life as a married couple being based upon a well-understood division of labour within the household. The phenomena of the ‘‘new man’’ developed, though his progeny of the 1990s, the ‘‘new lad,’’ was not quite what his father had expected. Coined to describe what was in fact a reinvented, consumer-led version of a long-held and ingrained masculine worldview, ‘‘laddism’’ turned out to be a snazzier, more fashion-driven, and above all more unashamed version of the old devotion to ‘‘birds’’(women), beer, and football (soccer).

Mass culture

In terms of popular leisure, music hall declined in popularity in the second quarter of the 20th century, but it left its mark on much of British culture, not least on the motion picture, which hastened its demise, and on television, which followed its end. By 1914 there were 4,000 cinemas in Britain and about 400,000,000 admissions per year. By 1934 this had more than doubled, and admissions continued to rise steadily to reach a peak of 1.6 billion in 1946. This was a particularly popular form of entertainment, especially among the working class: the lower down the social scale one was, the more likely one was to visit the cinema. The suburban middle-class motion picture audience of the 1930s was important but remained a minority. It is difficult to exaggerate the dominance of the cinema as a form of entertainment. In 1950, out of over 1,500,000 admissions to forms of taxable entertainment (and this included horse racing and football matches), cinema made up more than 80 percent. Hollywood films dominated, though until World War II there was a thriving British film industry. This domination continued after the war, although British cinema asserted itself powerfully from time to time; for instance, in the Social Realism of the 1960s, notably in the work of director Lindsay Anderson, and later in the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Parallel to these artful dissections of British life were the less high-minded but extremely successful ‘‘Carry On’’ comedies, which drew on the music hall tradition.

Reading matter continued to be produced within Britain, above all in the form of the newspaper. The British are inveterate newspaper readers, and there was mass consumption of a nationally based daily and Sunday newspaper press as early as the 1920s. This did much to create cultural uniformity, although, as with motion pictures, there were considerable differences of taste and preference regarding newspapers. However, after 1950 the emphasis on uniformity became more marked and was reinforced by the progressive concentration of ownership in the hands of a few proprietors. This circle of ownership became even smaller as time went on, so that at the beginning of the 21st century the empire of the most powerful of these media moguls, Rupert Murdoch, not only dominated much of the popular press and made considerable inroads into the so-called quality press in Britain but was also international in scope. Newspapers, however, were but one component of Murdoch’s and similar empires. The revolution wrought by new information technologies put control of a wide variety of communication forms, most importantly television, in the hands of these powerful individuals. Their political influence swelled as politicians of all persuasions were compelled to accommodate their power and, in a form of spin, play their version of the political game.

The development of a national mass culture seen in the previous period, in which the distinction between “popular” and “high” culture, if still important, was to some extent bridged, was to continue into the 20th and 21st centuries. (Cultural homogeneity was also intensified by increasing social and lifestyle uniformity.) To a considerable extent, from the 1960s, all culture became popular culture, so that differences of gender, class, and ethnicity became if not merged then renegotiated in terms of a mass, “shared” culture. In this process, the older class differences were eroded, in line with other changes in class structure, particularly in the manual working class. At the same time, new differences and solidarities also emerged, particularly around age and levels of consumption.

Popular music—or pop music, as it came to be called from the 1960s—became an important area in which identities were formed. Pop has modulated through many forms since the 1960s, from the punk of the late ’70s and early ’80s to hip-hop and the rave culture of the ’90s, and distinct styles of life have accreted around these musical forms, not only for the youth. The development of a uniform popular culture, at least as expressed through popular music, was greatly beholden to similar developments in the United States, where social identities were explored and developed in terms of black popular music, not just by African Americans but also by young white Americans. Given the great importance of Afro-Caribbean immigration into Britain after 1945, and latterly south Asian immigration, the experience of ethnic minorities in Britain to some degree also paralleled that of the United States. Concerns about national identity, as well as personal and group identity, became more important as Britain became a multicultural society and as the growth of European integration and economic globalization increasingly called British—and English, Welsh, and Scottish—identity into question.

The liberalization of the 1960s appears to have been crucial for many of these changes, with shifting gender roles being only one part of a broader international agenda. The civil rights movement in Ireland, student protest, and the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements in the United States were all part of the assault on the still-strong vestiges of Victorianism in British society, as well as, more immediately, a reaction against the austerity of postwar Britain. Change in family life and sexual mores was represented in the 1960s by a range of legislative developments: the Abortion Act of 1967; the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, partially decriminalizing homosexual activity; the 1969 Divorce Reform Act; and the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968. (Moreover, debate concerning sexual mores continued in Britain throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, not least regarding the ongoing attempts to change the legal age of consent and the controversial Section 28 Amendment to the Local Government Act in 1988, which prohibited local authorities from promoting homosexuality.)

Change was also based on the relative economic affluence of the late 1950s and ’60s. The disintegration of older values (including middle class values) was evident in the “rediscovery” of the working class, in which films, novels, plays, and academic works depicted working-class life with unparalleled realism and unparalleled sympathy (including the works of the Angry Young Men). The working class was therefore brought into the cultural mainstream. This was ironic at a time when working-class communities were in fact being broken apart by slum clearance and the relocation of populations away from the geographical locations of their traditional culture.

Changes in higher education, with the development of the polytechnics and the “new universities,” meant that, at least to some extent, higher education was thrown open to children from poorer homes. There was also the liberalization of educational methods in primary and secondary education, along with the emergence of comprehensive schooling, ending the old distinction between the secondary modern and the grammar schools. In practice, many of the old divisions continued and, indeed, increased. However, rather than being accompanied by increasing cultural divisions, the opposite was the case. There was a much more positive understanding of the “popular” than before. A more fluid, open, and commercial popular culture was signalled by the development in the 1950s of commercial television and, with it, the slow decline of the public broadcasting, public service ethic of the BBC. With the explosion of new channels of communication in the 2000s, particularly in television, there was a noted ‘‘dumbing down’’ of all media, which was especially evident in the celebrity culture of the new century and not unique to the United Kingdom. The new television gorged on this, as well as on reality programming and on the enormously increased popularity of professional football. These brought all classes together in a new demotic culture, although at the same time differentiation according to income, taste, and education became increasingly possible because of the technologies of the new media.

The various lifestyles associated with different genres of popular music are one telling indication of the way that lifestyle can determine an individual’s identity in modern society. This development reflects the withdrawal of the state from the direct intervention in social life that was so characteristic of the third quarter of the 20th century. The state’s turn to the market as a model of government has been reproduced in terms of the market’s direct role in the formation of cultural life, so that the relationship between public culture and consumer capitalism has been close, in many ways the one constantly trying to outguess the other. This game of one-upmanship, marked by ironic knowingness, has been labelled “postmodern.” However, this term has come to describe much of late 20th- and early 21st-century international culture and society, not only in Britain. It points to the growing understanding of the relative nature of truth, itself a reaction against the prevailing supposedly “modern” certainties of the 20th century (reason, freedom, humanity, and truth itself), which indeed have often had an appalling outcome. However, it was a sign of the times that these antifundamentalist currents, themselves critical of much of Western culture, emerged at much the same time as new fundamentalisms emerged in the forms of American neoconservatism and certain strains of radical Islam. The ferment of intellectual and cultural changes involved was inextricable from the massive changes under way in the transition to the novel forms of society made possible by new information technologies.

Sovereigns of Britain

The table provides a chronological list of the sovereigns of Britain.

Prime ministers of Great Britain and the United Kingdom

The table provides a chronological list of the prime ministers of Great Britain and the United Kingdom.